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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:08 pm
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Results for punishment (u.s.)
6 results foundAuthor: Di Tella, Rafael Title: Free to Punish? The American Dream and the Harsh Treatment of Criminals Summary: We describe the evolution of selective aspects of punishment in the US over the period 1980-2004. We note that imprisonment increased around 1980, a period that coincides with the “Reagan revolution” in economic matters. We build an economic model where beliefs about economic opportunities and beliefs about punishment are correlated. We present three pieces of evidence (across countries, within the US and an experimental exercise) that are consistent with the model. Details: Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Eocnomic Research, 2011. 53p. Source: Internet Resource: NBER Working Paper Series; Working Paper 17309: Accessed August 22, 2011 at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17309.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17309.pdf Shelf Number: 122429 Keywords: Economics and CrimeIncarceration RatesPunishment (U.S.)Sentencing |
Author: de la Vega, Connie Title: Cruel and Unusual - U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context Summary: In the United States, people who are found in possession of drugs, a non-violent offense, can be sentenced to die behind bars. A person can get a 25 year to life sentence for stealing golf clubs if he has committed two previous offenses, or a life sentence if he has stolen small sums of money three times. A person can get a series of consecutive sentences for each of the component parts of his conduct, such as counting each child pornography file as a separate offense, resulting in a 150 year sentence, much longer than if that person had actually molested a child. A person who sells a handful of drugs can face a mandatory sentence of 15 years. In many states, a child can be prosecuted at any age, tried as an adult, and sentenced to life without parole. U.S. law allows the same defendant to face prosecution twice, by both the federal and state government. And even if legislators decide to enact laws that lighten sentences, the new law does not automatically apply to prisoners already serving their sentences. All of these sentencing practices—life without the possibility of parole, “three strikes” laws, consecutive sentences, mandatory minimums, juvenile justice laws, dual sovereignty, and non-retroactive application of ameliorative law—are used frequently in the United States in ways they are not in the rest of the world. These American practices, focused on goals of deterrence and retribution, neglect the possibility of rehabilitation. Meanwhile, international human rights law places social rehabilitation and reformation as the aims of any penitentiary system. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a human rights treaty that the United States has signed and ratified, says, “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.” By ratifying this document, the United States has agreed that it will uphold this basic human right. Despite this obligation, the United States is an outlier among countries in its sentencing practices. The U.S. is among the minority of countries (20%) known to researchers as having life without parole (LWOP) sentences. The vast majority of countries that do allow for LWOP sentences have high restrictions on when they can be issued, such as only for murder or for two or more convictions of life sentence-eligible crimes. The number of prisoners serving LWOP sentences is more than 41,000 in the United States. In contrast, there are 59 serving such sentences in Australia, 41 in England, and 37 in the Netherlands. The size of the U.S.’s LWOP population dwarfs other countries’ on a per capita basis as well; it is 51 times Australia’s, 173 times England’s, and 59 times the Netherlands’. Recidivism statutes in the United States allow a person with multiple convictions to be given lengthy sentences. While many countries take past criminal history into account for sentencing, very few of them apply a blanket punishment that is as harsh as those used in the United States, where 3,700 people who have never committed a violent crime are serving 25 years to life in California alone. A systemic problem in the United States is that courts have not considered consecutive sentencing, or punishing one wrong as if it were two or more, as a major problem. As a result, they have not offered comprehensive remedies or established clear lines on when sentences should be consecutive or concurrent. Only 21% of countries around the world, including the United States, allow uncapped consecutive sentences for multiple crimes arising out of the same act. Mandatory minimum sentences in the United States have also increased sentence lengths, particularly for drug crimes. Under federal law, a judge must sentence a person convicted of possession of a kilogram of heroin to at least 10 years. The same offender in Britain would receive a maximum sentence of 6 months. There is no minimum age of criminal liability in many U.S. jurisdictions (in 32 out of 50 states) and in the 18 states that do have them, the age is less than 10. International legal standards however suggest the minimum age of criminal liability to be 12. The United States is only one of 16% of countries in the world that allow for juveniles to be tried and sentenced as adults. The United States is the only country in the world that in practice sentences juveniles to life without parole. Its maximum sentence for juveniles, life without parole, is much more severe than those found in the majority of the world (65%), which either limit sentences to 20 years or less or reduce the degree of the crime for juveniles. The United States, Somalia, and South Sudan are the only three countries in the world that are not state parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States, Canada, and Micronesia are the only countries known to researchers that allow successive prosecution of the same defendant by both the federal and state government for the same crime. International law and practice indicate that when a change of law will benefit an offender it should apply retroactively. The majority of countries in the world (67%) provide for this type of retroactive application of ameliorative law. In contrast, the U.S. federal government and state legislatures frequently refuse to apply the lighter penalty to those already sentenced. The sentencing practices in the United States persist at the same time that the United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest incarceration rate in the world. Never before have so many people been locked up for so long and for so little as in the United States. Details: San Francisco, CA: Center for Law and Global Justice, School of Law, University of San Francisco, 2012. 88p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 4, 2012 at http://www.usfca.edu/law/docs/criminalsentencing/ Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://www.usfca.edu/law/docs/criminalsentencing/ Shelf Number: 125320 Keywords: Mandatory Minimum Sentences (U.S.)Punishment (U.S.)Sentencing (U.S.) |
Author: Dolovich, Sharon Title: Exclusion and Control in the Carceral State Summary: Theorists of punishment typically construe the criminal justice system as the means to achieve retribution or to deter or otherwise prevent crime. But a close look at the way the American penal system actually operates makes clear the poor fit between these more conventional explanations and the realities of American penal practice. Taking actual practice as its starting point, this essay argues instead that the animating mission of the American carceral project is the exclusion and control of those people officially labeled as criminals. It maps the contours of exclusion and control, exploring how this institution operates, the ideological discourse that justifies it, and the resulting normative framework that has successfully made a set of practices that might otherwise seem both inhumane and self-defeating appear instead perennially necessary and appropriate. Appreciating the “cognitive conventions” by which current penal practices are rendered at once logical and legitimate proves to shed light on a number of mystifying features of the Americanpenal landscape, including why LWOP and supermax have proliferated so widely; why sentences are so often grossly disproportionate to the offense; why, given the multiple complex causes of crime, the state persists in responding to criminal conduct by locking up the actors; why prison conditions are so harsh; why recidivism is so high; why extremely long sentences are so frequently imposed even for relatively non-serious crimes; and even why the people we incarcerate are disproportionately African-American. Without claiming to provide comprehensive answers to these vexing questions, this essay offers a framework that helps to explain these striking aspects of the American carceral system. This framework takes as its starting point the practical demands incarceration imposes on the state itself: the exclusion and control of the people sentenced to prison. But as will be shown, in the American context, efforts to make sense of this way of responding to antisocial behavior quickly lead beyond practicalities to a moral economy on which the incarcerated lose not only their liberty but also their full moral status as fellow human beings and fellow citizens. What happens to them is thus no longer a matter for public concern. And as a consequence of this collective indifference, penal practices that may otherwise seem counterproductive, unnecessarily harsh, and even cruel become comprehensible and even inevitable. Part II of this essay sketches the structure of the American carceral system, exposing both its dependence on the logic of exclusion and control and the moral economy that drives it. Part III explores the self-defeating nature of current carceral practices — the way the combination of prison conditions and postcarceral burdens ensures that many people who have done time will return to society more prone to criminal activity than previously. Part IV considers the question of how such an evidently self-defeating system has been able to sustain itself, and locates the answer in the radically individualist ideology, pervasive in the criminal context, that construes all criminal conduct as exclusively the product of the offender’s free will. Part V illustrates the way this individualist discourse constructs criminal offenders as not just unrepentant evildoers but also sub-human — a process referred to as “making monsters” — and examines the work this normative reframing does both to vindicate the penal strategy of exclusion and control and to justify the arguably inhumane treatment of prisoners. Part VI explores the way that perceiving criminal offenders as moral monsters makes it difficult to distinguish the relatively few individuals who are genuinely congenitally violent and dangerous from the vast majority who are not; through this ideological (re)construction, all people who persist in committing crimes, even nonviolent offenders, can come to seem appropriate targets for extended and even permanent exclusion. Part VII considers the racial implications of exclusion and control, in particular the way the cultural construction of African Americans as “incorrigible” may explain why members of this group are overrepresented as targets of the American carceral system. Part VIII shifts the focus to the prison itself, where the self-defeating logic of exclusion and control has reappeared behind bars in the form of the supermax prison. Finally, the Conclusion considers how the destructive and self-defeating dynamic of exclusion and control may be disrupted. It argues that a political strategy emphasizing the financial costs of incarceration is bound to fail unless it also generates an ideological reorientation towards recognizing the people the state incarcerates as fellow human beings and fellow citizens, entitled to respect and consideration as such. Details: New York: New York University School of Law, 2012. 82p. Source: Internet Resource: UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 12-25; NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 12-60: Accessed November 24, 2012 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2171862 Year: 2012 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2171862 Shelf Number: 126994 Keywords: InmatesPrisonersPrisonsPunishment (U.S.) |
Author: Ouss, Aurelie Title: When Punishment Doesn't Pay: "Cold Glow" and Decisions to Punish Summary: Economic theories of punishment focus on determining the levels of punishment that will provide maximal social material payoffs. In calculating these levels, several parameters are important: total social costs, total social benefits and the probability that defectors are apprehended. However, often times social levels of punishment are determined by aggregates of individual decisions. Research in behavioral economics, psychology and neuroscience shows that individuals appear to treat punishment as a private good ("cold glow") and so individual decisions may be inappropriately responsive to the above parameters. This means that, depending on environment, aggregate punishment levels can be predictably above or below optimally deterring benchmarks and final social outcomes (e.g.. levels of cooperation and total social costs incurred) can be highly inefficient. We confirm these predictions in a series of experiments. Our research highlights the importance of understanding the psychology of punishment for understanding economically important outcomes and for designing social mechanisms. Details: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University - Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Department of Economics, 2013. 63p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 1, 2013 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2247446 Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2247446 Shelf Number: 128508 Keywords: Behavioral EconomicsCosts of Criminal JusticeEconomics of CrimePunishment (U.S.) |
Author: Johnston, E. Lea Title: Humane Punishment for Seriously Disordered Offenders: Sentencing Departures and Judicial Control Over Conditions of Confinement Summary: At sentencing, a judge may foresee that an individual with a major mental disorder will experience serious psychological or physical harm in prison. In light of this reality and offenders’ other potential vulnerabilities, a number of jurisdictions currently allow judges to treat undue offender hardship as a mitigating factor at sentencing. In these jurisdictions, vulnerability to harm may militate toward an order of probation or a reduced term of confinement. Since these measures do not affect offenders’ day-to-day experience in confinement, these expressions of mitigation fail to protect adequately those vulnerable offenders who must serve time in prison. This article argues that judges should possess the authority to tailor the conditions of vulnerable, disordered offenders’ carceral sentences to ensure that sentences are humane, proportionate, and appropriate for serving the intended aims of punishment. To equalize, at least in part, conditions of confinement for this population, judges should consider ordering timely and periodic mental health evaluations by qualified professionals, disqualifying facilities with insufficient mental health or protective resources, specifying the facility or unit where an offender will serve or begin his sentence, and mandating certain treatment in prison. Allowing judges to exercise power over correctional conditions in this way will allow judges to fulfill better their institutional function of meting out appropriate, humane, and proportionate punishments, subject prison conditions to public scrutiny and debate, and help reform the image and reality of the criminal justice system for some of society’s most vulnerable individuals. Details: University of Florida, Levin College of Law, 2013. 57p. Source: Internet Resource: Draft: Accessed May 29, 2013 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2267612 Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2267612 Shelf Number: 128844 Keywords: ImprisonmentMentally Ill OffendersProportional PunishmentPunishment (U.S.)Sentencing |
Author: McMillon, David Title: Modeling the Underlying Dynamics of the Spread of Crime Summary: The spread of crime is a complex, dynamic process that calls for a systems level approach. Here, we build and analyze a series of dynamical systems models of the spread of crime, imprisonment and recidivism, using only abstract transition parameters. To find the general patterns among these parameters - patterns that are independent of the underlying particulars - we compute analytic expressions for the equilibria and for the tipping points between high-crime and low-crime equilibria in these models. We use these expressions to examine, in particular, the effects of longer prison terms and of increased incarceration rates on the prevalence of crime, with a follow-up analysis on the effects of a Three-Strike Policy. Details: PLoS ONE, 9(4): e88923 Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 22, 2014 at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0088923 Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0088923 Shelf Number: 133795 Keywords: PrisonersPrisonsPunishment (U.S.)SentencingThree-Strikes LegislationViolence Crime |